Story Protocol: Tokenizing Intelligence Into Programmable IP Assets - Jason Zhao - Epicenter - In-Depth Conversations about Blockchain & Crypto

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
IP is an asset class where the market for that asset is so
inefficient. The transaction costs to do
business, to transact, trade, use, IP are so high.
And honestly, it's so inaccessible and opaque.
You have no information about this market.
So it's illegible, but it's alsoilliquid and it's high
transaction costs. So only the biggest, biggest
players with hundreds of lawyers, they're able to do
these like massive bespoke dealsin negotiations for IP.

(00:22):
But for the 99.9% long tail of this market, nothing happened
because the cost of making things happen are too high.
You know, whether or not people think about it in this way is
something that we interact with far more than with stocks,
right? Every single day, we spend 3 or
4 hours on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, we post photos, we
create photos. And with AI, there's going to be
8 billion Hollywood level creators that that can create

(00:44):
Hollywood level movies by just having a single idea and putting
in a single paragraph. So even though the word IP is
not how people maybe would call it, like the reality is this is
sort of the most tangible part of our lives, like consuming and
creating culture and AI is only going to supercharge that.
The amount of infrastructure that's been built for IP is very
low comparatively to how deep ofan impact it makes in our

(01:04):
everyday lives. We don't just build software.
We actually spend a lot of time and effort on the legal side of
things. So I'd say for every single
dollar we put into building the stack I just told you about on
the engineering side, we probably spent as much with some
of the best legal teams in the world to create a new licensing
framework. That's first of its kind and we
call it the programmable IP license.
Essentially it's a standard legal framework that maps 1 to

(01:26):
one with the parameters on story.
So if you set some terms on story, let's say in order to use
as IP you need to pay me $5, that smart contract parameter is
also mirrored on the legal contract itself.
In other words, there's a one toone link between code and law
and story, and everything on story has a legal wrap around it
that's enforceable. Welcome to Epicentre, the show

(01:47):
which talks about the technologies, projects and
people driving decentralisation and the blockchain revolution.
I'm Filika Ants and today I'm speaking with Jason Zhao, the Co
founder of Story Protocol, whichis a protocol in the IP space
that we'll dive into in just a bit before I talk to you about
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(03:39):
affordable hardware. Start your decentralization
journey today at nosis dot IO. Jason, it's super nice to have
you on. Thanks for having me, really
excited for this conversation. Before we dive into story
protocol, tell us a bit about yourself.
Absolutely. So my background is a little bit

(04:00):
more diverse. I didn't come, I haven't been in
the watching space for 10 years like some people here, but I've
been, you know, pretty interested in a couple things
before entering the watching space.
So I studied philosophy in university, really interesting
in political theory. And I also got a master's in
computer science, both at Stanford.
So I, I've always liked to focuson the intersection of the
humanities and, and technology. But originally, you know, my

(04:21):
first passion in technology and software was really AI.
So I did some AI research at Computer Vision lab at Stanford
and then I worked at DeepMind, which is Google's AI lab for a
couple years. And what I was doing there was
taking reinforcement learning coming out of Alpha Go and A0,
these large like chess playing, game playing agents and finding
ways to take that research, thatreinforcement learning

(04:42):
algorithms and, and apply them to build new products on the
back of that. So one thing that I've been
really interested in throughout my career is essentially finding
ways to take cutting edge technical research and find ways
to translate that into tangible consumer products.
That's what I was doing at Deepminds, but then I got really
interested in blockchain, I would say around 2020, around D5
summer, 20/20/21. And what really excited me was I

(05:04):
started to reread the Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers, in
addition to Uniswap and Maker and these other core protocols.
And what was really striking is that reading these white papers,
it was almost like reading a political treatise in some ways,
especially like Bitcoin and Ethereum are so ideological and
so philosophical with a little bit of computer science mixed
in. So I found that element very
intellectually interesting that,you know, block chains had this

(05:26):
ambition to become core substrate of a new type of
Internet and somewhat argue evenlike a new type of society.
So that was really exciting and,and I think very fresh.
And then the other component wassort of the open source ethos
and the organic, almost Darwinian ethos of, of
blockchain where, you know, if you build a smart contract, it's
this unstoppable soft software program that can last for
thousands of years as long as the blockchain is maintained.

(05:48):
And the idea that other people can permissionlessly build on
top of your work, they can fork it, they can build an
application on top of it if theywant, they can even maliciously
attack it, right. So if the software is
instruction perfectly, then there will be cracks and those
cracks will be manipulated. And that leaves this really open
research environment where you're going from white paper to
products, from research to production in like a matter of

(06:08):
weeks or months. Rather than what I was doing in
the AI world was, you know, you wait like five years to see some
research going to production because there's only like 5 or 6
players that can actually do that, right?
So that that's kind of how I gotinto blockchain.
And the, the sort of, you know, quick story of how story
happened is just me and my Covinder.
We're really focused on finding ways to build block chains that
could do something beyond money and beyond finance.

(06:30):
And I think IP is, you know, a $61 trillion asset class that
block chains haven't really tackled.
And there's so many problems that IP is having because it's
just so opaque, so inefficient of a market, especially with
respect to AI. You're starting to see all these
issues. So that's kind of how a story
started and and how it got into the space.
And what are the pain points that you currently see with how

(06:51):
IP is treated under the current system?
Yeah. So I mean, I could go on for a
long time about this, but just to kind of give you the high
level overview, you know, I think the history of crypto is
kind of building software based networks, blockchain networks
that replace struggling existinginstitutions, right?
And the best example of this is Bitcoin.
You have Satoshi responding to the 2008 financial crisis and

(07:13):
essentially saying, hey, like banks, maybe we shouldn't, maybe
we shouldn't completely rely on banks.
Maybe we should at least have analternative where software is
intermediary instead of like this massive, you know, Goldman
Sachs and Lehman Brothers institution, right?
And so that's kind of an exampleof where most blockchains have
been focused is trying to continuing that mission of
decentralizing finance. But if you look at the legal
system, that system is way more antiquated and way less

(07:34):
sophisticated than Wall Street. Wall Street is actually quite
sophisticated. If you think about, just to give
an example, I've talked to sort of executive companies where
their entire business is owning IP, right?
And IP can be scientific research.
So it can be pharmaceuticals, Itcan be the biggest brands in the
world, think Louis Vuitton or Nike or Puma or Adidas.
And then also think, you know, media, right?
So Hollywood, music, black, pink, things like that.

(07:57):
So it's a very broad asset class, but if you go to execs in
any branch of this asset class, I've, I've literally heard this
many times where they'll tell me, hey, sometimes I just don't
do deals where I could actually have someone else use my IP and
pay me for it. Because I need to go to my legal
team and find out what IPI own. And that, like querying what IPI
own and what slice of the rightsI own is actually more

(08:18):
expensive. It costs more millions of
dollars than the deal itself. So I just don't do the deal
right. And this is indicative of a
broader problem, which is IP is an asset class where the market
for that asset is so inefficient.
The transaction cost to do business, to transact, trade,
use IP are so high. And honestly, it's so
inaccessible and opaque to people like you.
You know, you and I like how do,how do I know what IPI can use?

(08:39):
There's not a place I can go. If you go to the US Copyright
Office, for example, it's like it looks worse than Craigslist,
right? So you have no information about
this market. So it's illegible, but it's also
illiquid and it's high transaction cost.
So it's a very inefficient market where you have only the
biggest, biggest players with hundreds of lawyers.
They're able to do these like massive bespoke deals,
negotiations for IP, but for the99.9% long tail of this market,

(09:00):
nothing happened because the cost of making things happen are
too high. And that's what stories trying
to solve is make it easier for individual IB holders, even also
AI companies, right? You're starting to see Open AI
is getting sued by the New York Times.
At the same time, they're also paying a bunch of IP companies
like 10s of $1,000,000 a year. So like, how do you have this
massive discrepancy? There's this like free for all
in the IP world. And our thesis is like whether

(09:21):
you're an individual IP holder, whether you're an open AI, it's
very hard for you to license IP.Like you also can't expect open
AI to make 10 million licensing deals per day.
They don't have the resources todo that.
So I think the thesis is the market for IP is very
inefficient and you need a blocking based global market, a
transparent market, a programmable market for IP.
How did you stumble upon this? Kind of like interweaving set of

(09:45):
problems? Because in a way, it's very.
It's very obscure and that most of us don't really deal with IP
directly the way that we kind ofdeal with say stocks or kind of
like financial products or even kind of like things like
reputation or so that kind of other people are trying to put
on chain. Yeah, it's a good question.

(10:06):
So the way I got interested in this issue is a couple a couple
of things. So 1 is just my time at T mines
and my time doing AI research. There's a saying in AI research,
it's quite simple, but it is very truthful, which is if you
have garbage in, you're going tohave garbage out.
And what that means is if you have really bad IP, really bad
data, you can have the world's most advanced AI model
algorithm. You can have the most computes,

(10:28):
all the GPS you want, and you can train it for a million
years, but it's still going to produce bad outputs if you train
it on bad data. And so very quickly I realized,
you know, even at DeepMind and at Stanford, that essentially
high quality data is a scarce resource and is a resource that,
again, doesn't have a very efficient market, right?
So not only are there a ton of legal battles around, you know,

(10:49):
like whether AI companies need to pay for IP, which I certainly
think they do. There's also just not an
efficient way to actually pay for that IP to actually even not
even just pay for it, but to discover it, right.
So the more you the closer you look at, you know, how the
market for this sort of like high valuable training data
works, the more you realize thateven the most basic insights as
who owns what IP and how much doI need to pay and how can I pay

(11:09):
them? Like these, these questions are
very difficult and very expensive to answer.
So that's kind of my first forayinto it.
And then, like I said before, I got really interested in
blockchains through D5 summer and I was thinking like, you
know, if blockchains truly are like this substrate for a new
society and or at least a new Internet, you know, can they do
things beyond just currencies? Because, you know, if you think
about the institutions that holdour society together today,

(11:30):
there's they go so much broader than just currency.
Like currency is a big part of it.
Money is a big part of it. But what I'd argue is IP as a
term is quite, you know, technical in some sense, it's
quite legal. But IP as a concept, you know,
whether or not people think about it in this way, is
something that we interact with far more than with stocks,
right? Every single day, we spend 3 or
4 hours on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, we post photos, we

(11:52):
create photos. And with AI, there's going to be
8 billion Hollywood level creators that that can create
Hollywood level movies by just having a single idea and putting
in a single paragraph. So even though the word IP is
not how people maybe would call it, like the reality is this is
sort of the most tangible part of our lives, like consuming and
creating culture and AI is only going to supercharge that.

(12:12):
So I think most people spend farmore time than on on TikTok,
let's say, than than on Charles Schwab or on Robin Hood and
certainly on Coinbase. So I think IP has a total like a
massive addressable market. It's very easy for people to
understand why it's valuable because, you know, even your mom
can understand. So like why Snoopy or Mickey
Mouse is valuable. They might not understand like
why, you know, collateralized loan over collateralized loan on

(12:33):
Ave's is so valuable, right? That might be more niche, but I
think the amount of infrastructure that's been built
for IP is very low comparativelyto how deep of an impact it
makes in our everyday lives. Why do we think kind of there
needs to be a needs to be a blockchain at the core of the
solution for this, right? Kind of like if it sounds like

(12:54):
I'm kind of some standardizationand kind of like digitization
would already kind of make a bigdent.
I agree. I think some standardization
would make a big dent. And I think the analogy I like
to always go back to is because it's familiar in the blockchain
space is money. And so I think SWIFT has has
somewhat standardized international payments, right?

(13:14):
There are sort of global paymentstandards because, you know,
countries with different bankingsystems and different currencies
need to be able to exchange money with each other.
And so we as a society have tried to come up with an like a
kind of overlapping set of agreements and, and standards
like SWIFT that allow us to pay money to each other across
borders. But then again, stable coins are
probably 100 X cheaper than SWIFT.

(13:35):
So I think that, you know, like,I think where IP is today is
they, they don't even have a SWIFT.
OK, there's no, there's no swiftfor IP.
So yes, I do agree, like even having off chain solutions would
be really helpful. And I think that it's great that
people are thinking about that. But I, I like with stable coins
being 10X better than SWIFT, I think a blotching based solution
will be 10X better than even like a swift for IP.
And the reason why is because I think the killer app, if I had

(13:57):
to summarize in one sentence forblockchain just to create
unstoppable programmable digitalmarket and you have this instant
settlement, instant payment for IP across the world, regardless
of where you're from. And I think that's really,
really powerful. So I think that's why blockchain
is unnecessary. And then as a very pragmatic
matter, we're a developer product.
So we, we don't necessarily build a bunch of user facing

(14:19):
applications. We're more like Stripe or a
payment platform in the sense of, you know, you're not going
on stripe.com to pay for your hoodie or your shoes that you
just bought. You're, you're going on some
website and Stripe is powering, it's kind of behind the scenes
powering the payment experience.That's how we imagine the story
is. We're kind of like a developer
tool and if you're building an app that touches IP, whether
it's an AI application or consumer app or creator tool,

(14:39):
you're kind of using Story just to sort of register IP that's
being created on your app two-story or pull IP that's
already on Story and bring it into your app.
And if that's the case, we need to sell to developers.
And in order to sell to developers, we need to assure
them that if they're about to cut put their entire company's
IP, which could be 90% of the company's value on a system,
that system cannot just shut down.

(15:01):
Because what we're promising to developers or we're pitching
them, I should say, is you register your IP from your
application once on Story and can now access monetization and
distribution from the hundreds of other applications in our
ecosystem, right? So it might originate from like
you might create a character on one creator tool, but then that
character can be used as a comicin, you know, five other apps,

(15:22):
right? And so if we just, if we had the
ability to just shut that off, shut that IP system off, then
we're cutting off like a very important source of revenue for
that business. And I think developers from, you
know, seeing, for example, Twitter shut down their API, I
think in the 20 tens, that was very devastating, right?
And people have to stop trustingcentralized API so much that if
we're asking these businesses where 90% of their value is

(15:44):
accrued in IP, like it's good tohave this immutability and
unstoppability condition where they know that, you know, the
software we put out there that they're registering their IP on
is actually not in our control either.
So I think that's an added layerof benefit.
But I do think sort of just having a global settlement layer
in an instant payments is reallyimportant part of why we chose
to have blockchain since the back end.
OK. I think this sets the stage

(16:05):
super beautifully. So kind of let's dive into kind
of like how the protocol itself works and then we can kind of
loop our way back around to kindof like how how this kind of
applies to the real world. So story is actually its own
blockchain, right? So kind of what?
Why did you choose to kind of build a new blockchain rather
than kind of use an existing one?

(16:26):
Yeah. So there's two reasons for that.
One is more, I would say historical based on like our own
sort of trials and tribulations as a company.
The other is more philosophical and future facing.
So in terms of the sort of history of why we ended up
building it all, one that was never really our intention.
So we started off trying to build just a pure smart contract
protocol and we immediately likeran into a lot of limitation.

(16:48):
So essentially what we wanted todo, the way that IP works is
it's very graph like in nature if you try to represent it in a
database structure. And what I mean by that, one
example I can give is this game called Super Smash Brothers.
So it's a pretty popular game where you have like characters
from many different franchises that are able to fight with each
other. And it's like kind of a combat
game, right? So you have Mario from Nintendo,

(17:10):
you have Sonic from Sega, you have, you know, characters that
are licensed in essentially fromlet's say 5 to 10 different
franchises. So you can imagine there's like,
let's say 30 to 50 characters inthat game from many different
franchises. And the way that we would
represent that on story is you'dhave like 30 different parents
IPS. So you have Mario, you have
Sonic, you have some other character, and they're all kind

(17:31):
of like licensing their IP into this game, which is its own sort
of dots or node on this graph, right?
So you can imagine like 30 parent nodes all connecting to a
single child node. And if if the game generates
revenue, let's say generates $100 in revenue, that revenue
would be flow, it would flow up to each of the parents based on
the agreements that they had, right?
So maybe Mario gets 1% of the revenue, so it gets $1.00,

(17:51):
right? So now you have this revenue
coming in to this graph and flowing up to each of the 30
parents. But the thing about building
something that's permissionless and on chain is that those
parents can have parents as well, right?
So you have money moving into one node.
That's the game. It flows up proportionally to
all the parents. And then the parents have their
own parents. And so you have this very
computationally expensive graph traversal problem.

(18:13):
And the EVM as it stands today is just is not optimized to do
this sort of computation. And because it was so expensive,
we had to limit our protocol such that each IP could only
have two parents connected to it.
And that really limits the sort of things that you can do on
story. For example, if you have a song
that has three components, like,let's say a harmony, a melody,
and then like some instrumentals, you can't

(18:34):
represent that on story because you can only have two pants.
And so we had to limit a lot of the applications and we decided
that that's not the route we wanted to go.
Like we didn't want to just waitfor the EDM to get better.
And So what we did was we just built our own execution
environment. And this kind of goes to this
sort of feature facing reason. We, we decided that like IP is,
is just a very different type ofasset than money.

(18:55):
And it requires a lot of additional things beyond just
the graph traversal problem I mentioned to you in terms of the
execution environment, you also need to validate each IP.
You need to validate whether it's unique or not, right?
So if someone registers Mario, like we can't have like 5000
Marios on story, right? That that's not how IP works.
There's only one Mario and it's the unique one.
And then we need to, we need to track other usages of Mario,

(19:17):
right? So this even like this sort of
decentralized validation service, we had to build that
ourselves. And so the benefit of building a
layer one, although it's much, much more costly and takes a lot
more time on the sharing side isthat you can customize every
layer of the stack. So we can choose exactly what
software our validators are running.
We can choose exactly how to customize our virtual machine.
And I think that, you know, the product that we put out there on

(19:39):
public main net is going to be version zero.
And like I think there's going to be many, many improvements,
fundamental improvements that wewant to make over the coming
years as we get more feedback. And it's very difficult to
change and customize these things.
If you're I, they're building a smart contract protocol on
another layer one, or if you're even building a layer 2, where
if Ethereum is struggling, for example, you're just by default

(20:00):
struggling. And if Ethereum is making
certain changes, so it's OP codes, you kind of have to
accept those changes. And so I think for us, the
freedom and independence was worth the extra cost as we
started to encounter more and more bespoke problems that we
ran into. I want to double click on the
how do you know which one's the right Mario?
But kind of I want, I want to dothat a little bit later.

(20:23):
So maybe, maybe first up, let's talk about kind of the tech
stack kind of you're building on.
So kind of like what tech stack did you pick and kind of like
which novel features did you introduce?
And kind of like how did you make those trade-offs when
you're when you were designing the system?

(20:43):
Yeah. So our current layer one is, is
a little multi layered. So we have a very, I would say
composable stack and in the sense that we can upgrade each
each layer of the stack very easily if we wanted to.
And that kind of alludes to the flexibility that we want to have
in the future. But basically on the consensus
level, we're using a version of Comet BFT, which is also

(21:06):
supported by the Cosmos SDK. So we have compatibility with
the Cosmos SDK, which we think has the biggest developer
ecosystem out of any sort of blockchain based SDK.
So that allows us to have like avery developer friendly
consensus level. So that's that's what we're
doing on on the consensus side for the validators.
And then on the execution layer,we started with the EVM, but we
made a lot of changes to solve these IP specific problems.

(21:28):
So I talked about the graph traversal issue and and flowing
royalties through this very large graph.
So we have pre compiles that areoptimized towards lowering the
cost of that execution and we will continue adding more and
more execution customizations inthe future.
And then on top of so we have the consistence layer with the
execution layer. Enshrined natively into our

(21:49):
execution layer is the smart contract protocol called the
proof of creativity protocol. And this is kind of the original
smart contract protocol we were building way back when, a few
years ago. And the basic functionality of
the smart contract protocol is to #1 create a standard set of
metadata for each IP asset so that whether your IP is from
country A or country B, whether it's from the US or from Europe,

(22:11):
it essentially has the same metadata whether it's registered
by open AI or by small in the app, right?
So that's number one is the samesmart contract metadata.
And then #2 is allowing each IP to be programmable, right?
So not just storing the static information around each IP on
chain, which is relatively uninteresting, but actually
allowing the programmable terms that each IP owner sets for that

(22:32):
IP to be enforced automatically.And so an example I can give is
like, let's say I create, let's say I create like some sort of
music. I can register on story and I
say anyone can use this song in AI remixing if they pay me $5 a
fronts. And if this remix that they make
blows up and generates a lot of revenue, then I want 10%.

(22:53):
These terms are actually registered on a smart contract
through the proof of crazy everyprotocol.
And whenever someone tries to use that IP, we would actually
enforce the payment upfront. And then also if the derivative
generates revenue, we would alsoflow like as used in this Super
Sashio example, we would flow 10% of the revenue to the
original easy creator, right? So in this example, it would be

(23:13):
myself. And so essentially what we've
done is allow every single IP asset to have its own terms, its
own programmable parameters and to allow them to be enforced on
chain through story, automatically building this kind
of like parallel IP system on chain.
So that's enshrined on top of our execution layer.
And then the last thing on our stack is essentially this
validation service I was talkingabout, which every single IP

(23:36):
asset that comes in that gets registered to story, we actually
check whether it's unique based on the reference set of every
other asset that's already been registered on Story, as well as
a common sets of IP assets like Mickey Mouse or Thanos that we
know are likely to be infringed upon.
So every single IP asset that's coming to store, we actually
check for basic level of uniqueness before it can be
registered. And that's also a separate

(23:57):
system that we built that works in parallel to the stack I just
shared. What do you do if I kind of just
bypass story and just use, you know, the the IP without ever
involving story, right? Kind of like I can take this
song and kind of just remix it. What prevents that?

(24:18):
Yeah. So I mean, one thing that is
really important to note is there's many layers of defense
that we have. So first and foremost, right,
we, we don't just build software.
We actually spend a lot of time and effort on the legal side of
things. So it's safe for every single
dollar we put into building the stack.
I just told you about on the engineering side, we probably
spent as much with some of the best legal teams in the world to

(24:40):
create a new licensing frameworkthat's first of its kind and we
call it the programmable IP license.
And essentially what that license is, is a standard legal
contract. Think about it like similar to
AYC safe, right? It made YC safe, made it really
easy for people to raise capitalwithout having to have a priced
round. And so essentially it's a
standard legal framework that maps 1 to one with the

(25:02):
parameters on story. So if you set some terms on
story, let's say in order to useas IP, you need to pay me $5,
that smart contract parameter isalso mirrored on the legal
contract itself. In other words, there's a one to
one link between code and law and story, and everything on
story has a legal wrap around it.
That's enforceable, right? So story is not guaranteeing
that no one will ever be able touse your IP in a malicious way.

(25:25):
That's impossible without running like some sort of Big
Brother security state where we track every click that
everyone's doing at all times. That's impossible.
But what we can say is at the very basic level, if you do not
support the terms that the creator has set, you are
violating the law, right? And usually that is actually
quite a level of deterrence thatpeople aren't familiar with,
right? So if, if there is like actual
consequences, then people are less likely to infringe.

(25:48):
So that's kind of like the baseline, right?
Like the worst case scenario on story is the best case scenario
today, right, which is that someone violates your IP and you
have to go to court. That's not a very good outcome.
It's very expensive, but we think that's important as a
backstop. So that's kind of why we
invested on legal side. But hopefully we don't have to
get to that backstop. Hopefully we can actually build
a set of solutions that are likelevels of escalation below

(26:09):
having to go to court because wewant to avoid that.
And So what we've done is like Imentioned before, we have this
IP validation service. And So what it does is we
partnered with a lot of Web 2 enterprise providers whose, you
know, entire companies focus on scanning the Internet and
finding instances of similar images.
So every asset on story by virtue of it being registered on
story. Now all these different

(26:29):
providers are actually searchingfor instances where that IP is
being used, right? And we can flag that.
And we have an on chain attestation service where where
we essentially flag, hey, your IP may be used elsewhere, you
might want to take a look. And if the violating IP is also
on story, right? So let's say if there's two IPS
on story, 1 is pretending to be the other, we would actually
have the ability to demonetize the IP that's infringing.

(26:51):
So that those are sort of the ways that we like have these
levels of escalation such that on chain, there are already
quality signals to people that want to use IP as well as to the
IP holders that there may be something wrong or that they
might want to avoid using a certain IP.
But the legal backstop is alwaysthere, right?
So I think that's kind of important as well as to have
that legal backstop. I, I have more legal questions

(27:13):
in just a bit, maybe let's talk about the blockchain for for a
little bit. So I I assume this is proof of
stake, right? Yes.
So who are your validators? So our validators are a mix of
what I would say like our relatively professional
validators that you see working on a lot of other top block
chains. And then we also have a good

(27:33):
amount of validators from our community.
So we have validators being run by students at Stanford.
We have validators from people, you know, in Asia all around the
world. And so we, you know, right now
we're starting off with the Genesis set of 64 validators,
which is relatively common for something you see in the Cosmos
SDK realm for Comet BFT, becauseComet BFT has two to three
seconds block fidelity time. So it's good to start off with a

(27:55):
smaller set of validators, but we're planning on very quickly
ramping that up and getting to like 80, even 100 in the first
year. And so when we do expand, our
focus will be primarily filling those with more community
validators. So like I know some folks at
Stanford that I, that I talked to some students there, like
they didn't get in on the Genesis set.
So they're very excited about getting in on the second as well

(28:16):
as like other sort of community players, either ecosystem
projects or folks that we work closely with outside of that.
I think those are the people that we're really prioritizing.
But right now it's a set of professional validators as well
as like I would say 20 to 30 community validators.
So it's a little bit under half that would be community.
And like as we expand, most of the marginal additional

(28:38):
validators should be from the community.
And how do you ensure interoperability with other
block chains because kind of like in principle you can kind
of use IP in different ways too,right?
In principle, kind of say I could use this as collateral or
I could kind of borrow against this and so on.
So how do you can you can you kind of create that level of

(29:02):
interoperability? Yes, this is something that's
the core focus of ours at the end of the day, because our our
thesis, our success case of story is that we actually become
a core protocol for the Internet.
And by that I mean there's not many people out there that like
our big Domain Name System fans are like HTTPS fans.

(29:22):
Like there's not many people saying, I love the Internet,
like, you know, IP protocol, TCPIP, right?
Like, because they're just the fabric of our lives.
Like we just take HTTP for granted.
We should take DNS for granted. And I think that's the level of
invisibility that we aspire to. And in order to get to the point
where we are just this, this sort of peer-to-peer IP system,
that power is not just government IP systems, but also

(29:44):
individual companies in this, inthis massive ecosystem, we need
to have a lot of adoption from different parties, right?
And I think that starts with offchain IP.
So we worked with, you know, Justin Bieber, we worked with
Dua Lipa, we worked with some top Hollywood creators as well
as, you know, stability AI, right, which is one of the
world's largest AI companies. They, they are the creators
behind Stable Diffusion, which is the biggest, most most

(30:06):
remixed, I should say, most Fortimage creation model, image
generation model in the world. So we have like these large off
chain partners that we work within the AI world and in the world
of IP holders. And the way that we treat other
chains is very similar. So we just treat them as off
chain. Essentially, you're not on
story. So if you are building an IP on

(30:27):
base or Solana or Polygon or what have you, essentially it,
we treat it the same way as we would treat, you know, a creator
who Justin Bieber who isn't on chain, right?
Because ultimately we want to beable to support IP no matter
where it is. And that IP should live wherever
it's living before, but it's specific transactions, it's
specific exchange information, it's settlement should be

(30:49):
settled on story. So I would say that we do have
like integration with layer 0, so we can have crushing
communication. But our overall philosophy is I
told you about the entire stack that we built.
There's this consensus layer, execution layer, there's a
protocol layer on the smart contract side, but wraps around
that entire stack is a simple API.
And it looks just like the Stripe API, right?
Like it's just a service that you can use.

(31:12):
And so whether your app is on Solana, whether your app is
completely off chain, you just call her API and it doesn't work
for you. So story is sort of this
invisible IP settlement layer, but we are wrapping and
abstracting away this entire stack in the form of an API that
anyone can call regardless of whether they're on chain or off.
Shame. OK.

(31:32):
How do you envision kind of the shift from you know the
traditional IP system to your onchain models?
So kind of what? How do you get people to move?
It's a good question. So there's two, there's two ways
to do this and we focused on both ways but to different

(31:53):
extense. So the first way is on board off
chain IP and I would say existing IP.
The second way is to just get net new IP on story.
And I actually think the second way is more interesting.
So we spend probably 80% of our time trying to just get all
future IP being created on storynatively, right.

(32:13):
So I say story native on chain native IP.
And the reason why we spend moretime there than on traditional
IP or existing IP is because I think about it similarly to
YouTube. Whenever you have like a new
paradigm shift in content, it's never the incumbents that are
the best, most avid adopters of that technology.
So YouTube is a good example because YouTube when they

(32:34):
started, they didn't go after Hollywood people and say, hey,
Steven Spielberg or James Cameron, why don't you create
like a 5 minute movie on YouTube, right?
They went after, or at least I should say, the people that
adopted YouTube were the Mr. Beast of the world's right, or
people in their living rooms, like creating home videos for
fun. And over time, they got more
sophisticated. And now I would say like Mr.

(32:54):
Beast, Marquis Brownlee, these big YouTube creators probably
make two or three or even 10X more than the average, like very
successful Hollywood producer, director, right?
So it's taken a couple decades. But my point is, YouTube would
not have succeeded if they had gone after traditional big
players in Hollywood. They succeeded by finding a
neglected class of creators and serving them, and those people

(33:15):
became YouTube native Internet native creators.
And I think the same thing will be true of IP when it comes to
story, which is that brand new like economics are going to be
unlocked when you have this new marketplace for IP.
And the people that get it may be crypto native at 1st and
they're probably just creating net new IP on story rather than
onboarding just these massive catalogs of already existing IP.
What is like a purely on chain native version of IP look like

(33:38):
that's kind of the ecosystem that we're building.
That's what a lot of the apps that have been built on top of
story are doing is just letting people create IP natively on
story. So that I think is a big focus
where we're not even trying to onboard the existing class.
And I think that's going to be very exciting.
On the other hand, like there's so much valuable IP out there
like, and we want to get as muchof it on the story.
So we do have to work with thesetraditional institutions.

(33:58):
And I should think 2025 is just going to be a great year to work
with institutions, especially, you know, being an American
company like in the USI think a lot of more people in the
government are much more open toblockchain now, right?
And that's, that's a real opportunity because I think with
STORY, one of my goals for this year is to work with
institutions and in particular with copyright offices and

(34:19):
patent offices around the world,essentially because they all
have very outdated, very fragmented, very expensive and
inefficient IP systems. Imagine if every single
copyright that was registered inthe US was also registered on
Story and in a standardized way such that anyone around the
world could use that copyright and generate revenue for that
American copyright holder. And same thing for someone in
Germany or someone in France, like they would able if they

(34:41):
registered copyright or patents with the German or French
governments, that would also be our story.
Now you have this fully composable network of IP.
And so just starting to work with governments, this
conversations are already starting to have with folks in
the US government and other governments about being a sort
of back ends for their IP systems.
I think that's also really exciting.
And actually it's going to be like way more efficient than on
boarding one by one. But just to kind of outline

(35:04):
progress we've already made withtraditional IPS, we've already
started to work with, you know, we've, we've taken Justin
Bieber's Peaches and tokenized it as an IPRWA.
So now all the rights are on chain.
We've done that with a song withMiley Cyrus and Dua Lipa.
And we're planning on doing thatsome more with some big IPS in
Korea. So we, we are working with some
of the world's largest music catalogs and IP catalogs to on

(35:24):
ramp their IPS on the story. And then last thing I'll say is
with the stability AI partnership, the stable, the
fusion partnership, one reason that's so exciting is because
90s and 99% of the contents in the future will probably be AI
assisted, AI generated. So I think in the next decade,
we'll see, you know, in twenty, 3590% of AI content is AI
generated or AI assisted. And the best way to register a

(35:46):
new IP on a story is to just embed ourselves at the AI model
level. So now with Stable Diffusion,
any outputs of Stable Diffusion,if you call Stories API, it gets
registered on story as an IP asset.
So if we get embed ourselves into these AI models and these
AI models are what's going to beproducing most of the IP in the
future, that's going to be huge onboarding tactic for us.
And that's something that we're jumping down on.

(36:07):
So I think there's a lot of waysto get IP, but ultimately I
think getting new IP is actuallyeven more exciting than just
getting the existing IP. Can you tell us about some of
the applications that sit on on top of story and kind of like
create IP directly on story? Yeah, absolutely.
So the one I just mentioned around like tokenizing some of

(36:28):
the biggest music catalogs, thatis a very interesting protocol
that's built on top of story called Aria.
And essentially what Aria does is they have really close
relationships with some of the biggest music catalogs in the
world. And eventually they'll expand
beyond music to Fine Arts and and other sort of IP assets.
But the idea is they want to do what's, you know, I'd say Ondo

(36:48):
did for T-bills, but for a much more interesting as a class,
which is these like really iconic IPS, right?
The thing about treasury bills is that, you know, anyone can
bring, yeah, most people can purchase treasury bills, right?
Treasury bills is probably one of the most common financial
instruments in the world. So bringing it on chain is less
beneficial, I I think because it's already so common.
And also treasury bills are not programmable.
So I mean, if you have it on chain, like the programmability

(37:11):
of that treasury bill is not enhanced by bringing it on
chain, there's not much you can do.
It's just it's a treasury built.Whereas with IP, what Aria is
doing is they're bringing some of the biggest hits out there,
right? Like I just use Justin Bieber
speeches as an example, and they're bringing it on to Story,
which does two things. One, it means that people who
have no access to IPS and asset class, right?
I was talking about the 99.9% long tail.

(37:33):
All these people, you and I can now access the yield from all
the streams of Justin Bieber's speeches, right?
So as I'm listening to Justin Bieber's speeches on Spotify, I
am benefiting the people who have access to that asset on
Aria. And that's really exciting
because you're not taking this asset that used to be held by
like the top .1% of institutionsand letting everyone have access
to it. But it's not just a yield

(37:53):
because that part is kind of similar to what Ando's doing
with treasury bills, bringing treasury bills yield on chain.
What's even more exciting is that the rights are also on
chain. So not just the economics, but
also the rights are on chain. And so whoever owns the Justin
Bieber asset or even a fractionalized part of that
asset on Story now has the rights to create AI remixes of
that song, right? And that's really exciting

(38:14):
because that licensing is done through Story.
And that's something that just isn't possible in the
traditional legal world. If I wanted to remix Justin
Bieber's speeches, I mean, I would have to go talk to his
lawyers, right? That they'll be very, very
difficult for me to do that. Now.
I can do it with a single click on Story.
So I think that's one exciting use case.
The state Stable Diffusion is another one.
And then we are actually announced recently that David

(38:35):
Goyer, who is the creator behindThe Dark Knight trilogy, the big
Batman movie series, he's the lead screenwriter there.
He's actually creating a brand new IP franchise on story where
every single character, every single spaceship, every single
story in that universe is on story.
And his fans and his community can actually extend and add new

(38:55):
stories, add new characters, addnew lore.
And if accepted by David, they're actually share revenue
in the entire franchise. So if that franchise becomes a
movie and generates a lot of revenue, all their revenue would
be shared with people who contribute along the way.
So it's almost like a Wikipedia for fiction where you have these
atomic building blocks, these IPassets that the community can
now have full reign to build on top of.
And now there's actually alreadyAI agents being trained on top

(39:18):
of the IP that David has put out, so that these AI agents are
actually creating, you know, short films, images based off of
the Canon, and they can monetizeas well, right?
So this is an example of a sort of a creator who's actually
leaning in to opening up that IP, creating a market around it,
leaning into AI, even extending his work and helping him make
revenue. Because if that AI does a really
good job, builds a lot of popularity, generates a lot of

(39:39):
revenue, David is also going to get the share.
So I think all these things are like very exciting early
experiments of how story can be used in AI has where it can be
used in sort of defy or IP FI and then also just by like
everyday users that may not be crypto native.
I think IP is going to bring a lot of people on chain that just
had no reason to be on chain before.

(40:00):
You talked about the legal framework that kind of you're
setting up to go alongside the software part of this, in which
jurisdictions is, is that recognized?
Yeah. So luckily for us, we started
with copyright. And the the great thing about
copyright is that there's this thing called the Burn
Convention, which is a little bit obscure, but basically the
Burn Convention, I believe it was 18841886, essentially around

(40:23):
200 countries around the world met to harmonize the basic
standards of copyright law, right.
And the reason why that's important is because if I
created Pikachu as Nintendo in Japan, that doesn't mean that
like, someone in the US who's not in Japan should be able to
use Pikachu freely, right? Like you want but these ideas
and this creativity and this knowledge to be global and you
want it to be protected globally.

(40:44):
And so most copyright law is it functions relatively similarly
across countries. What is difference is
enforcement. So some countries enforce
copyright much more heavily thanothers.
But when it comes to at least declaring this sort of
principles, they are very similar.
And our legal contract is designed primarily with the US
mines, but in a way that it is compatible with most other

(41:04):
countries copyright systems. And so that allows us to start
giving global or near global protection to to basically all
the people using story, right. So that's why one of the reasons
why we started with copyright isbecause you do have this global
harmonization on the basic principles of copyright law.
OK, I understand. What are the flavors of I, I PR

(41:25):
there? I mean, there must be more,
right? Yes.
So there's copyright, which covers media, right?
So you think about songs, movies, anything creative or
like a poem, a new character. And then there's there's patents
which cover sort of unique ideasor processes.
So you can patent a drug, you can patent a specific process
for making a car, things like that.
And then there's trademarks, which are sort of protecting the

(41:47):
brands that businesses and people kind of do commerce
around, right? So like think about Nike logo
that's trademark. And so yeah, patents and
trademarks are a little bit morecomplex.
That's something that we haven'twe're not supporting on day one
of mainnet is patents and trademarks, but it's something
that we're very interested in supporting.
And I actually think the inefficiencies and patents and
trademarks are much higher than in copyright because they're

(42:08):
just higher value assets in general on average.
And so right now we're we're kind of starting to do the legal
work to also have that legal wrapper for patents and
trademarks on story. But one of the things that we'll
have to deal with, as you said, is that they're less global,
right? So you have a Patent Office in
the US, you have a Patent Officein Germany.
Those are completely different patent offices with different
processes. So being able to harmonize that

(42:29):
we might have to go country to country as opposed to copyright,
which is much more global. OK, Maybe let's talk about the
enforcement of IP rights on story.
So kind of like you talked aboutMario and only being able to
kind of like upload Mario once. How do you discern who who the
true Mario IP holder is to kind of give them the rights of

(42:49):
reaping the the yield on on thatasset?
Yeah. So the way that we do this is
twofold. So there's sort of like AI would
say like an information signal layer and then there is a
dispute layer. And so the information signal
layer, every single asset that someone tries to register on
story, we have four or five different IP partners that

(43:09):
essentially are specialized. They're basically API services,
right? SAS services that go and scan
the Internet and say, hey, have I ever seen something that looks
like this? And if so, what percentage
confidence do I have that this is infringing or not unique.
So every single asset that comesin the story, we actually query
a series of these AP is and kindof average out the results and
try to give a signal. Now it's not binding.

(43:30):
So the signal might say, hey, this is like 99% likely to be
infringing. And the idea is that like we're
a permissionless protocol, right?
So ultimately if you see a Marioasset and we're like this is 99%
infringing and you want to use it, then you're running that
risk as a user, right? But we want to provide
developers and their end users as much information as possible.
So we have all these signals that every IP asset has based on

(43:51):
it's analysis, right? The the sort of second layer of
this is a dispute system. So anyone around the world can
dispute an IP asset on story andsay, hey, this asset is actually
infringing. So if Nintendo goes and sees
this Mario with 99% certainty that it's infringing and it's
like this is not registered by aNintendo employee, then they can
go and dispute it. And the dispute process right

(44:13):
now we're using UMA, which is the same thing that settles Poly
market. But in the future, we want to
have, you know, professional lawyers and and you know, more
sophisticated methods of settling disputes.
But basically there's an on chain arbitration process and
the results of that process is enforced on chain, right.
So in the case of Mario being 99% chance of infringing,
Nintendo raises disputes. Well, the dispute is probably
going to end that this asset is indeed infringing and it would

(44:36):
be demonetized and essentially not surfaced by story zone API
and story zone indexing, right? Because it's on chain, we can't
actually remove it and we don't want to like censor fully.
So you can still look at it on chain, but it will say, hey,
this is, you know, an asset that's been successfully
disputed. So we have basically our own on
chain sort of information system, almost like a sort of
like, you know, nutrition facts of each IP and then also an on

(44:58):
chain dispute system, which is like an on chain court that can
actually take decisions. So that is all the sort of on
chain apparatus that we've had to build to make story like a
high quality IP repository, a global IP marketplace.
And then like I said before, like I mean, maybe they're not
perfect because we're just starting out.
So maybe there's some gaps on the edges.
That's why we also have the legal backing where, you know,
if none of that works, then you can still take it to court and

(45:21):
you'll still have that protection from the law.
But I mean, to the extent that we can avoid that, we want to
because it's very expensive to do that.
So we try to keep things on chain.
Say I'm I'm the original Mario owner and kind of like someone
else has uploaded it. Do you force me to kind of
dispute it on chain first or canI take you to to court right
away because kind of like you you.

(45:42):
Can do that right away. Yeah, yeah, OK.
Because you can't really force someone to kind of like.
No, of course not. Yeah, the dispute is more of
like we think, I mean, if you'rea Nintendo, I think it's maybe
like a hard to use Nintendo's example.
They probably already have a bunch of lawyers that are suing
people out. So they probably don't need
this. But we're really thinking about
the long tail, right? So if you're a creator, I mean,
the unfortunate truth of the current legal system as I set up

(46:02):
is that it, it's, it's biases towards people who infringe on
IP because the cost of persecuteor prosecuting IP infringement
is so high that most creators choose not to, right?
So if you're a creator and you're not making that much
every year and someone violates your IP, it's going to cost you
10s of thousands of dollars overpotentially multiple years to to
go and say, hey, this person, you know, to go to court, right?

(46:24):
So it's actually incentivizes creators to not file a suit.
And that systematically biases the system towards people who
infringe because they know a lotof these people, they don't have
the resources to defend themselves.
What we're trying to do is, at least if it's on story, if it's
on chain, we're giving you a very cheap way to sort of defend
yourself that's much less cost prohibitive than the traditional
system. But of course, if someone wants
to go straight to the, you know,very, very complex gunfights of

(46:48):
the traditional legal system, then of course they can do that.
But you can't remove my IP from from, from the blockchain,
right? Kind of like it's
permissionless. And even if kind of like even if
it was something that I, I wouldn't want to be online, you,
you can't remove it, right? We can't remove it.

(47:10):
It's in the sense of we choose not to censor on story because
we don't want to be. But you could truth.
Well, it's, it's, it's it's hardto remove content that's on
chain. It depends on whether it's on
IPFS or are we like on, are we? It's very difficult to remove.
If it's on IPFS, then there are ways to do that.
But the, you know, even if we could, we wouldn't because we

(47:31):
think it's important to be like a sort of censorship resistance
and in line with the uses of blockchain.
But that's why we have this API,right?
So functionally speaking, it's kind of like it's kind of like
Twitter. If Twitter decided, OK, we're
not going to remove your post, but we're just going to make
sure that the algorithm never serves your post to anyone.
And the only way to see this is if you have to go on the
specific profile, right? Except 20 times harder because

(47:52):
navigating the blockchain is not, you know, it's not like as
easy as navigating Twitter. So that's kind of the idea,
right? It's kind of like we just don't
show anyone this asset anymore. So if someone calls our API, we
just don't show it to them. Now, if someone wants to go and
you know, actually traverse the blockchain, then they can find
it. But you know, the amount of
people who want to do that are are probably very low.

(48:14):
And so it's functionally a soft,it's soft removal, but we don't
want to actually remove all possibility for people to
actually access this. You said earlier that you can
also demonetize certain IP. How do you do that?
So essentially just we just prevent people from.
So we have this sort of royalty system, so we prevent people

(48:35):
from being able to send funds tothat wallet that's part of the
royalty system. So basically like every IP asset
has its own wallet, a smart wallet associated with it.
So it almost has like is autonomous bank account attached
to each IP, but that bank account is kind of held through
stories, proof of creativity protocol.
And one of the features in that protocol is we can actually
prevent that account from occurring more value if it's

(48:57):
deemed as disputed. So essentially we just remove
the ability for that IP asset. You know, let's say you know,
it's owed $10 because some royalties were, were shared.
It's it's unable to claim those $10 from its wallet.
How does the governance behind that work?
The governance for for stories mostly done on the blockchain
level. So we, we have like some basic

(49:19):
governance through, you know, decentralization.
We have a forum, but essentiallylike the governance is, is it's
making suggestions to how we canimprove the protocol.
But for now, we kind of want to make sure that we can steer the
protocol for the first few months before we sort of allow
things to be decentralized progressively.
I think the first few things that we'll decentralize is
actually protocol fees rather than the specific logic of the

(49:41):
royalty module. So for example, you know, you
know, Uniswap has protocol fees and the, and the Dow has the
ability to sort of turn it on and off.
I think that's something that we'll be looking at, giving that
decision to the community. OK.
But in due course kind of the community will be, it will be
the one deciding which IP to demonetize.

(50:02):
No. So that's based on the dispute
dispute system. So in this case, it would be UMA
and the people participating in that on UMA.
But in the future, we want to add a lot more dispute options
so that it's not just one option, but basically the
dispute process and the outcome.That process is binding.
There are ways to, let's say, try to reverse that dispute as

(50:22):
well, so you can challenge the dispute, but essentially, or
appeal I should say, but essentially the dispute system
is what is used to turn on and off the royalties.
And once kind of an item has been disputed, can they just
upload it again and I have to dispute it again?
Or do you ban kind of like re uploads?
Yeah, it's hard to ban re uploads in some sense because

(50:45):
people can I mean, even if we try to ban a wallet, right,
anyone can create a new wallet. And so it's kind of like a
constant battle. Like I think there's no, there's
no unless we centralized the whole thing, there's no one but.
You said you scan the content, right?
When I registered you scan yes. We do scan the content.
Yeah, yeah. So.
So you could in principle do it right.
We could in principle do it, butyou know, you know, you never

(51:07):
know if Nintendo is the one that's actually registering it,
right? So we don't want to ban, let's
say, Mario. We don't want to just ban Mario
forever because Nintendo could actually register Mario rather
than some random person, right? So that that's why we don't want
to ban the image, because the image, maybe there's nothing
wrong with it. It's just the person that's
registering it. It's not the one that owns the
image. OK.
And the person who's registeringthe image without my permission

(51:31):
as the IP holder, are they penalized in any way other than
kind of like being demonetized? Because otherwise they can just
grieve me, right? Kind of like they can just make
5 million accounts and kind of upload the, the Mario pick
5,000,005 million times. And kind of like I have to
dispute it 5,000,000 times and kind of it'll just cost me a

(51:52):
bunch of time. Yeah.
So I think that in that case, right, I mean, it's a good edge
case, but ultimately, I mean that is the sort of risk of a
permissionless system is that you have the ability for people
to do things openly. I think what in realistic will
happen is that essentially like there will be social consensus
and there will be reputation systems built around this.
And so like we already have a lot of apps that are focused on

(52:13):
this specific sort of problem. We don't have to solve every
problem ourselves as like an ecosystem.
So one example is essentially there's a, there's an
application called Verio which allows people to stake IP on
assets and say, hey, if I'm staking this token on an IP
asset, I'm basically saying, I believe that this is a real one,
right? And so I think there are going
to be a lot of sort of immune system sort of type of responses

(52:37):
that develop in the ecosystem where people might only really
look at or take seriously IPS with a certain level of stake.
And if everyone knows, hey, likefor whatever reason, there's
5000 Mario's on story, but this one has 10,000 USCC stakes, then
that one's going to be the the accepted one and the other 5000
will probably be looked at with,you know, just an understanding
that that is not the real consensus one, right?

(52:58):
So I think there are sort of like many crypto economic ways
that we can actually generate legitimacy in a more scalable
way. But ultimately, like as a matter
of practice, we are not trying to limit the amount of people
who can register. And even if we tried to limit
specific wallets, they can always create more wallets,
right? So the way that we approach this
problem is less how can we prevent any wrongdoing because
if you want to have 100% successin preventing wrongdoing, you

(53:21):
need to have full control over the system.
And that just kind of now you'reavert into this sort of
centralized version of IP that governments try to do very
unsuccessfully. And in trying to achieve
perfection, they actually achieved meat equity, whereas we
could have more scalable systemsthat have like, you know,
different approaches to developing an immune response,
that kind of spamming or other forms of long tail behavior to

(53:42):
make them unprofitable essentially, right?
Because you know, if you have a lot of IP staked or a lot of
tokens staked on one asset, and then there's 4000 other versions
of that asset that don't have any, then it's pretty clear
which one is the real 1. OK.
What do you do in a case where kind of the I, the IP rights are
disputed even off chain? Because that happens very

(54:04):
regularly, right? I mean, there's IP fights all
the time. Say I developed a drug and
someone else says they kind of developed the same drug ahead of
me and that there's a lawsuit. Do you just freeze kind of the
registering of that IP until it's decided in court?
Yeah. So one thing that we are

(54:24):
developing is essentially a way to kind of take off chain events
and bring them on chain. So there's this thing called the
story orchestration service. And actually the story
orchestration service is one thing that we already use now to
coordinate these like off chain infringement detection
providers. So these these detection
providers are not primarily serving boxing companies.
They're primarily serving boxingcompanies.
And so they have like some sort of, you know, auction algorithm

(54:46):
and then they send a result to us and we need to bring that
result on the story. So one thing that we want to
extend is if there are off chaindisputes, can we actually have
an Oracle that brings them on chain and updates with the
result, right. Ultimately our thesis that story
is kind of similar to stable coins in a way where, you know,
stable coins, they are totally ERC 20 tokens.

(55:08):
If they're on theorem, they're totally like, you know,
blockchain native, but they derive their legitimacy from the
US dollar and then they take theUS dollars legitimacy and add in
the blockchain technology to make it much better, right?
So now you have instant global payments with stablecoins
instead of having to go through all these terrible processes if
you just had U.S. dollars. I think stories are the same
thing, right? Like we're not trying to create
a parallel legal system where like we have a completely

(55:30):
different set of laws. What we're trying to do is take
the legitimacy of the legal system and then make it 1000 X
better on chain. And so if there are things
happening in the traditional legal system, then we should be
responsive to it. And that's a really great point.
So I think right now we don't have that support live, but one
thing that the story organization service is meant to
do is to bring the relevant events and analysis from off

(55:52):
chain world into on chain world.So as, as time goes on and as
we, you know, prove story out, Ithink that that'll be an
essential feature. And actually one thing that I am
eager to do is, is actually, youknow, when people violate IP on
story to take it to court in thetraditional legal system, just
to prove to everyone using storythat this actually does work and
that we're putting our money where our mouth is.
So I, I, I think that we're, we're sort of driving towards

(56:15):
that institutional adoption by showing that we're going to put
our money where our mouth is. OK.
Can you outline the road map mapfor story?
So what are the key milestones in the next year and beyond
that? Yeah.
So I mean, the biggest milestonefor us coming up is our public
main net launch. So that's going to be very, very
soon. And you know, I'm really excited
to to to sort of celebrate that with the community with the team

(56:37):
because we've been working on this for three years.
And so we've had a few test Netsby now, and this will be like
our first main net and just making sure everything goes well
beyond that, looking forward to deep in our relationship with
stability AI, as well as workingwith, you know, some big players
in the AI world's. Because I think, you know, story
is one of those few projects in the blockchain space that can
work with these massive AI companies because we're
providing them with this massiveessentially training set of IP

(56:59):
that they can use, but also pay for, right, in a legal way.
So continue to work with AI providers, starting to work with
governments, as I mentioned, andthen essentially just building
up the ecosystem. And a lot of the technology,
like the way that we see story, as I mentioned, is it's not a
finished product. Like even though it's on
mainnet, I think a lot of a lot of the blockchain space has this

(57:19):
notion of like once you launch on mainnet, it's kind of like
the core thing it's done, it's set in stone, but we kind of see
this as an iterative approach. And so we're dropping our white
paper very soon, which will showa lot of the future directions
we have. But I think there's a lot of
innovations we can make in decentralized file storage.
I think there's a lot of innovations we can make in
connecting deeper to the AI stack and knowing, you know, the

(57:40):
moment AI model generate something, whether it can be
registered on story. I think there's just going to be
a lot of technical upgrades to our also just like basic
scalability as a blockchain as we get more and more adoption.
So I see our tech as very much V0, and I think we're just going
to have to add a lot more bells and whistles as the year goes
on, in addition to partnering with these AI companies and
working with governments. Cool, so if a creator or

(58:04):
developer kind of wants to get involved with sorry, where would
you send them? Yeah, so for developers,
definitely our docs, so docs dotstory dot foundation, we updated
like more than once a week. So super live, super up to date.
We also have a version that you can easily download to train an
AI agent on. So we know that a lot of people
are coding with AI helpers now. So you know, our documentation
is AI consumable. And then for creators, we

(58:26):
actually going to launch a very interesting first party app that
allows you to seamlessly register IP on story very
shortly after our public main net.
So I'd encourage you to experiment with that.
It's going to be called the IP Portal and it's going to be a
really, really easy app for you to register, protect and
monetize your IP without having any technical ability or knowing
what the blockchain is. So that will be launched pretty

(58:46):
shortly after our public maintenance.
Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on,
Jason. Thank you.
Thank you for having me.

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Story Protocol: Tokenizing Intelligence Into Programmable IP Assets - Jason Zhao

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Story Protocol: Tokenizing Intelligence Into Programmable IP Assets - Jason Zhao